How Bernie Sanders Fought for Our Veterans

Just before Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders excoriated Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s record to a cheering crowd of 10,000 at a Madison arena on Wednesday night, Walker’s staff tweeted: “Thousands of veterans suffered in VA scandal yet @BernieSanders downplayed it & attacked those who exposed it.”

The tweet, to say the least, was misleading. The Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has long supported our veterans—even if he doesn’t support all our wars. And in 2014 he accomplished the last thing you might expect from a candidate whose campaign brand is firebrand: He negotiated a major bipartisan agreement with two conservatives to deal with the veterans health care crisis.

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In spite of—or perhaps because of—his aversion to war, Sanders has a long history of committed service to veterans. He became chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, and that is how he wound up at the negotiating table with Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida.

They were driven there by scandal. Veterans across the country were waiting months on end for appointments and the wait times were being hidden. Up to 40 veterans in Phoenix died while waiting for appointments. Hundreds never even got onto a list. And retaliation was the order of the day for those who tried to blow the whistle.

From the moment the long-gathering scandal broke into public view in April 2014, it took Congress less than four months to produce a new law—a split second by Capitol Hill standards. That it happened at all, and so fast, was a testament to the determination of Sanders and his partners to surmount the red-blue divide in American politics. It speaks volumes in particular about Sanders, who pushes for a single-payer government health system in every speech, that the law introduced a private-care option for veterans.

Sanders’ broadsides against greed and international trade agreements, his calls for “Medicare for all” and new taxes on Wall Street and “the billionaire class,” suggest he is a left-wing analogue to Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. That is, the candidate as movement leader—an identity that is helping him gain ground in Iowa and New Hampshire polls against establishment favorite Hillary Clinton.

And Sanders has certainly had his insurgent moments, including an impassioned 8.5-hour floor speech in December 2010 protesting a tax deal struck by President Obama that, in Sanders’ opinion, did not ask enough of the wealthy. It went viral, crashed the Senate server and quickly became a book entitled The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.

But Sanders is not an ideologue in the mold of a Michele Bachmann or a Ron Paul, both of whom made far more headlines than laws during their years in the House. He is not averse to compromise or incremental progress, and he works within the system to make that happen. In January, for instance, he and Sen. Patty Murray were the lead writers of a letter asking Obama to update overtime standards in order to make more people eligible for overtime pay. Obama announced such an update a few days ago.

Sanders served as Burlington mayor and in the House before his election to the Senate in 2006. He hasn’t survived in politics for more than three decades by courting confrontation and operating on the fringe.

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Sanders and veterans may not seem like an obvious match, but they have been a constant in his career. When he rose to chair the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, he noted that the first bill he ever introduced in Congress—in 1991—called for reimbursing members of the National Guard and Reserve for income they lost while deployed in the Persian Gulf War. Now veterans and the committee Sanders once led are touchstones for him as he runs for president.

His connection with them is an extension of what Brenda Cruickshank, a retired Army nurse and immediate past commander of the Vermont Veterans of Foreign Wars, describes as Vermont’s ethos of making sure people are taken care of. Sanders listens to his home-state veterans at town meetings, private meetings and through a veterans council, she says, and his staff does an excellent job when veterans call with questions or needs. “He works for veterans. He’s not just saying that. He does do the work,” she says.

When he announced his White House bid outside the Capitol in April, Sanders summoned veterans in an argument against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing individuals to contribute as much as they want to campaigns. “I’m the former chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee,” he said that day. “And I can tell you I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process.” In his stump speech he routinely calls for a country “where every veteran who defends this nation gets the quality health care and benefits they have earned and receives the respect they deserve.”

There are pockets of Sanders devotees in the veterans’ community, among them liberals and people who most need specialized government care, such as disabled veterans. There are veterans organizing for his campaign, turning out at his events and finding each other online to exchange tips on how to promote him. “His work on veterans issues is already one of my main talking points with people in general,” Reddit user NateCadet of California wrote a few weeks ago on a thread of veterans supportive of Sanders.

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This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.